The Psyche: Flying Scared

“It’s not that I’m afraid of heights,” says Violinist Nathan Milstein. “Not even that I am terrified of accidents. It’s harder to define. I’ve flown three times in my life, and I was absolutely miserable every minute. I can’t breathe, feel time is suspended, and there I am—alone with my anguish.”

Soviet Pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels know just how Milstein feels. They too refuse to fly, unless it is absolutely necessary. Even then, says Gilels, “my extreme nervous sensibility is affected; I sense any sound or nuance during the flight.” As for Richter, he requires at least five days’ rest after a flight to calm down and restore his sense of hearing. Nor are musicians the only ones affected. Former Boston Red Sox Star Jackie Jensen says: “I quit baseball for several reasons, but the main one was fear of flying. It just wasn’t worth it.” And Science Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury has refused to fly at all, even when John H. Glenn Jr. offered him a lift in his private jet.

Better Wrecked than Crashed. By all indications, there are only small numbers of people whose fear of flying is so phobic that they find it all but impossible to get into a plane. But they have little trouble recognizing one another, if only because they are all inveterate train and boat travelers. When Composer Andre Previn and his wife spotted Folksinger Joan Baez on a train, they greeted her warmly: “Hello, welcome to Cowards Anonymous.” Baez has since conquered her fear, but not Actress Joanne Woodward, who, like many another nervous flyer, takes a couple of tranquilizers before getting on a plane. “It’s an absurd way to travel,” she explains. “One is bound to feel claustrophobic—no one was meant to be 35,000 feet up in the air.” Says Comedian Bob Newhart: “I take white-knuckle flights. I have a couple of drinks before, a couple during the flight—and then I sit there and suffer.”

Neil Coles, a top-ranking British golf pro, took a slow boat to Houston last year for the Ryder Cup matches rather than fly, thereby eliminating himself from several tournaments that took place while he was at sea, including the one with the richest first prize of all, the $55,000 Alcan. Singer Jack Landron passed up a free junket to Finland, which he won on TV’s Dating Game, because he refused to fly. While designing the capital city of Brasilia, Architect Oscar Niemeyer regularly drove the 575 miles overland from Rio de Janeiro rather than take a1½-hour flight.

Sheer Will Power. Top Manhattan Model Peggy Moffitt first flew at the age of seven, and used to commute to California by plane; now she travels only by train. Why the changeover? “Nothing dramatic,” she says, “I just got married, and that made me feel mortal.” Most groundlings trace the beginning of their phobia to an especially hairy flight. Jackie Gleason swore off flying in the 1940s when the plane on which he was a California-to-New York passenger lost two engines and landed in a Midwest wheatfield. Old Trouper Jimmy Durante also dates his dislike of flying to “the worst flight ever” some 20 years ago. He still flies, because “I gotta. But when it gets choppy, I say, ‘Oh, my God,’ and hold to whoever is sitting nearest.” Such people get little satisfaction from the statistics, which show that air fatalities v. auto fatalities last year were .29 to 2.40 per 100 million passenger-miles; they are just plain scared of flying.

Even old Air Force men have been known to break out in a sweat once aloft in the passenger seats. Alabama’s George Wallace, an engineer in a B-29 crew during World War II, is no exception. Recently, when a British journalist tried to interview him on his chartered Electra high over Illinois, Wallace turned off all questions while he stared fixedly out the window. “Listen, sonny,” he said, “I’m tryin’ to get us out of this weather. Now leave me be.” California’s Ronald Reagan is no braver. Congratulated recently because he seemed to have overcome his fear of flying, Reagan snapped back: “Overcome it, hell. I’m holding this plane up in the air by sheer will power.”

The Reasons Why. “Fear of flying is not a laughing matter,” says San Francisco Psychiatrist Edwin F. Alston. “It can involve clear physical suffering—nauseous stomach, sweating, trembling, and sometimes inability to move.” In treating patients, Dr. Alston has found that the causes go far beyond the experience of a particularly rough flight. “It has always been a multiple thing,” he says. For a few, the fear may result from a death in the family resulting from an air crash. For others, the airplane may represent separation—from both the ground and loved ones. Deep feelings of guilt often play a role. “A man who feels guilty toward his wife,” says Alston, “expects a catastrophe, such as a crash, as punishment.”

Jack R. Edwalt, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, also finds that other anxieties contribute to the fear of flying. “Trouble with the boss, an impending tax struggle, problems with a new product—the airplane can aggravate these.” Often, too, there is simply “mistrust of the gadget.” Polaroid’s manager of community relations, Bob Palmer, who cheerfully admits, “I get tanked up while the airplane does,” agrees. “It’s really a hatred of being dependent on something mechanical,” he says. Then too, executives who feel that they must always be in command may be bothered by the feeling that they are not in control in the air.

Honeymoon Conk-Out. Curiously, acrophobia—the fear of high places—plays a minor role. Pop Music Composer Jesse Fuller says that he would gladly climb up a 150-foot ladder, but he has driven across the U.S. nine times rather than fly. Los Angeles Psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn also notes that for many flying has a sexual connotation; one patient he treated was frightened only of coming in for a landing, a fear that Grotjahn found closely connected with fear of detumescence. Comedian Don Adams, Secret Agent 86 in TV’s Get Smart, grounded himself for eight years after the jet plane carrying him and his bride back from their Mexican honeymoon crash-landed in a blizzard when its four motors conked out. Finally, when a psychiatrist suggested to Adams that it might take five years on the couch to get at the root of his fears, he decided that some self-therapy was called for. “I figured I had to fly to prove to my wife I was O.K.,” says Adams. “So now I’m scared to death. But I fly.”

Others seek to conquer their fear of the unknown by learning how to pilot a plane. Former Heavyweight Champ Floyd Patterson cured himself in this fashion. On the other hand, Producer Stanley Kubrick (2001, A Space Odyssey), while learning to be a pilot, became so dismayed at what he felt were haphazard traffic-control procedures that he has never flown since. Sometimes hypnosis works. Don Newcombe, the former Dodger pitching great, spent a dozen sessions with a hypnotist, now flies regularly and says: “My feeling is that these pilots have just as great a desire to live as I do.”

Some people, of course, simply cannot be moved to fly. Says Miami Psychiatrist Sanford Jacobson: “When I was in the military, I saw men leaving Viet Nam who, despite their eagerness to get home, requested the 24-day boat trip to California rather than the 21-hour flight.” Even in such company, Italian Tenor Giuseppe di Stefano is a special case. Trying to get up the nerve to fly to Europe, he locked himself and his wife into a hotel room at New

York’s Kennedy International Airport for three days. A Pan Am executive finally persuaded him to take off, but when the plane touched down in Boston on the way to Italy, Di Stefano fled from it. He rented a car and drove it back to Manhattan. There, he boarded the next boat to Genoa.